As it was, they had let their poor
cold grimy colourless heroes and heroines loaf about in squares and in
corners of streets in all weathers, without any attempt at artistic
sanitation--for there was no provision for burying their dead works of
art out of their sight--no drainage, so to speak, whereby statues that
had been sufficiently assimilated, so as to form part of the residuary
impression of the country, might be carried away out of the system. Hence
they put them up with a light heart on the cackling of their coteries,
and they and their children had to live, often enough, with some wordy
windbag whose cowardice had cost the country untold loss in blood and
money.

At last the evil reached such a pitch that the people rose, and with
indiscriminate fury destroyed good and bad alike. Most of what was
destroyed was bad, but some few works were good, and the sculptors of to-
day wring their hands over some of the fragments that have been preserved
in museums up and down the country. For a couple of hundred years or so,
not a statue was made from one end of the kingdom to the other, but the
instinct for having stuffed men and women was so strong, that people at
length again began to try to make them. Not knowing how to make them,
and having no academics to mislead them, the earliest sculptors of this
period thought things out for themselves, and again produced works that
were full of interest, so that in three or four generations they reached
a perfection hardly if at all inferior to that of several hundred years
earlier.

On this the same evils recurred. Sculptors obtained high prices--the art
became a trade--schools arose which professed to sell the holy spirit of
art for money; pupils flocked from far and near to buy it, in the hopes
of selling it later on, and were struck purblind as a punishment for the
sin of those who sent them. Before long a second iconoclastic fury would
infallibly have followed, but for the prescience of a statesman who
succeeded in passing an Act to the effect that no statue of any public
man or woman should be allowed to remain unbroken for more than fifty
years, unless at the end of that time a jury of twenty-four men taken at
random from the street pronounced in favour of its being allowed a second
fifty years of life. Every fifty years this reconsideration was to be
repeated, and unless there was a majority of eighteen in favour of the
retention of the statue, it was to be destr